Translating the intimate: digital renderings of bio-matter into material forms through artistic research.

Abstract

"Art invites us and allows us to linger at the frontier of what there is, and it gives us an outlook on what might be." Henk Borgdorff (2010, p. 61). Developing a body of work that explores an intimate relationship between my blood and the machinic in a practice-led process of fabrication, this PhD enquiry considers how the materiality of my body is translated, dispersed amongst the non-representational “froth of code”; becoming techno-corporeal abstractions through techno-scientific processes. This is my distinct contribution to knowledge. Throughout the written exegesis, poetic praxis is developed as my unique method of approach—both initiated and grounded by the nature of practice-led artistic research (praxis)—and philosophically inflected by poesis: processes of questioning and reflection that reanimate key aspects of current techno-scientific practice. I reflect upon a series of works fabricated through both two and three- dimensional print practices: articulations which I read (after Chadwick) as my "Enfleshings"; a virtual fleshy materiality. I also provide a critical analysis of emergent material practices of 3D Print (also known as Additive Layer Manufacture). The exegesis elucidates the artworks, their materiality (as Nylon 12) and concludes by considering future scenarios of biological techno-scientific practice, in which the body itself becomes 'fabricated'. A portfolio of practice is presented as a parallel volume, which enables the reader to navigate documentation of the artistic research process. These stem from early studio-based experiments; tacit-intuitive approaches to materials and processes which foreground later, lab-based fabricated works. The portfolio includes photographs of the completed series of art works, collectively named as Untitled_Force (2011-2015) alongside documentation of their public exhibitions, reconfigured as sculptural installation at three different sites. I argue throughout that poetic praxis as a methodology is a vital means of approach, revealing the unknown within existing instrumental research paradigms.